A ficlet is a short story that enables you to collaborate with the world.

Once you’ve written and shared your ficlet, any other user can pick up the narrative thread by adding a prequel or sequel. In this manner, you may know where the story begins, but you’ll never guess where (or even if!) it ends.

About Ficlets

Ficlets are shorter than short stories. Well, no, actually, they are short stories, but they’re really short stories. Really short, as in there’s not a maximum word count … there’s actually a maximum character count (1,024). There is also a minimum character count, and the number of that beast is 64.

If you wish, we’ll provide you with inspiration (photos, themes, suggested beginnings and endings, even other ficlets), but you’re completely free to blaze your own trail. Now, here’s where the real fun comes in: Each and every ficlet is modular in that, though you may have written a stand-alone story with a beginning, middle, and ending, your fellow ficleteers may choose to write a prequel or sequel to your story. In this respect, you can think of ficlets as literary Legos.

All ficlets are covered under Creative Commons, which means that if you wrote it, you own it. Period.

To give you an idea of what you can do with 1,024 characters, that is the exact length of this “About Ficlets” description.

Florence Wolfson kept a teenage “Mile Stones” diary from 1929 to 1934. Recently, the battered volume was reunited with its author. “I’m quite a busy young lady,” she said upon rereading it.

“THIS book belongs to …,” reads the frontispiece of the little red diary, followed by the words “Florence Wolfson” scrawled in faded black ink. Inside the worn leather cover, in brief, breathless dispatches written on gold-edged pages, the journal recorded five years of the life and times of a smart and headstrong New York teenager, a girl who loved Balzac, Central Park and male and female lovers with equal abandon.

Today, like every other day, we wake up emptyand frightened. Don't open the door to the studyand begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.Let the beauty we love be what we do.There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.Don't go back to sleep.You must ask for what you really want.Don't go back to sleep.People are going back and forth across the doorsillwhere the two worlds touch.The door is round and open.Don't go back to sleep.

I would love to kiss you.The price of kissing is your life.Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,What a bargain, let's buy it.

Daylight, full of small dancing particlesand the one great turning, our soulsare dancing with you, without feet, they dance.Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?

All day and night, music,a quiet, brightreedsong. If itfades, we fade. Rumi

you’re repeatedly sending me kisses and i am going to let them linger, barely touching my skin. they’ll get impatient and i’ll tease them some more. slowly moving my body away from them as to make them follow. until they explode.